The notion that consumer-generated content lacks authority is not a new one of course. Wikipedia has been in the middle of this storm for a while now, and then there was that recent report (I wish I could remember where I saw it) about the proportion of web content ranked highly in search results that is generated by teens.
This morning I found this collection of bad user-generated Amazon.com reviews of great books (that is, books commonly understood by scholars to belong in the canon of great literature).
Does authority matter outside the context of scholarship or government?